Okay, so I feel like contributing to the Humans Are Weird section and it’s just, humans and predators get along? Like, we have mutual beneficial relationships and companionship with animals that, in theory, we should be fighting with.
Like, we have cats and dogs as pets, some people have wolves, we see lions and tigers and think they’re cute, hell, zoologists have been raising Big Cats for years, not to mention the stories about people care taking bears.
And if Jurassic World became a thing, you can bet your ass someone would Chris Pratt a set of pack dinos
So like, imagine that theres a race of aliens who are, by genetic script, predatory, and vicious and every alien system are like “Theres no chance at establishing peace with them, it’s impossible.” But then humans come and we stumble across a wounded one like
“this species ?? Is adorable ?” And all the other aliens are like
“No, human Mike, it is a vicious predator! It’s bet to just avoid the quadrant where theyre from and destroy any that come too close.”
“You want to kill him, but he’s just a wittle cutie!”
“ … Human Mike, stand back!” And of course the humans rally around it and force the other aliens out and slowly feed/build up trust with the species and we form a bound with them and Aliens are like ????
Evetually humans teach the aliens how to respond to the species and while they’re still pretty dangerous if they’re hungry and you shouldn’t turn your back on them, there’s still like, relative trust between the species.
My contribution to the humans are space orcs, it’s probably been seen before but oh well.
So, You guys know about pursuit/persistence hunting right? Where we just follow the prey without stopping until it slows down or drops dead from fear and exhaustion?
What if when aliens first discover earth, the thoughts of these bipedal predatory omnivores are bad enough but we seem pretty obsessed with farming our food so maybe we aren’t much of a threat.
Once humans are zipping about in space, that’s when they realise that these harmless bipedal omnivorous farmers are actually hunters who just never give up.
If someone hurts their crew, they just follow it for days before killing it. These soft fleshy things are terrifying. These soft fleshy things may not be the strongest or fastest but we are some of the hardest damn things to kill because we just won’t die and if we survive we won’t stop until we get you.
We farm things because we can and because it’s easy. Not because we have to in order to survive.
We farm things because we’re too busy fighting each other to hunt for everything.
We stake out areas, we mimic its noises, we stalk it, we put ourselves in danger to kill a food source for fun.
Vilgo was a professional space pirate. They knew their job inside out. They had to. They’d seen what happened to others who didn’t. So their arrest came as something of a surprise.
Their last raid had only been a cycle ago, and they were still living on the profits. The raiders had taken the usual precautions – featureless rad suits, which gave no hint of their appearance, levitation boots and psionic grabbers to avoid actually touching anything on the ship, and, of course, a 20kAmp bolt of electrical energy into each of the crew members. They had missed no one. Vilgo was sure of that.
Apparently, though, the human in front of them didn’t care that they shouldn’t have been able to find Vilgo. The battle had been brief – his crewmates had been taken before they knew what had hit them, and the human seemed to be immune to their darts, though each was coated with enough opiate to fell three Gralankszs. Indeed, the human seemed a bit woozy, but had still managed to knock Vilgo prone on the ground. Now she was shackling them, reciting their rights. But how?
When they asked her, she responded that a member of the SS Nyancat had tracked them down.
Clearly, this was a lie. They remembered taking the Nyancat, yes, but that was more then eighty three cycles ago! And they had left none alive! The Nyancat should still have been floating in space with the corpses of its crew!
The officer, being a human, didn’t mind telling the story. As their crew was being taken in, she explained that her sister, the person who discovered Vilgo’s hideout, and been in the observation room of the Nyancat recording themselves with a handheld communication and entertainment device. After surviving the electrical bolt (the officer was unclear as to how this happened saying only “Yeah, it was a bit of a nasty shock,”), she had come to her senses and managed to find an image of Vilgo in her recording. Although she couldn’t identify them, she did manage to catch the serial number of their suit. After repairing and escaping in one of the emergency life vessels, she had made her way to the nearest hub world, and traced the suit to the factory it was made in. By examining the records, she determined when the suit had been stolen, and sat through 147 hours of surveillance footage before finding the tapes that showed Vilgo actually stealing the suit. Then she had begun the slow search for Vilgo when she happened to spot him at the first bar she looked in. After that, she simply placed one of the rainbow trails the Nyancat had been famous for on Vilgo’s ship, and followed it to their base.
Vilgo remembered that bar. That trip had been less than a cycle ago. Surely there was no way that an overused escape pod could have traced a barely-visible trail so quickly. At sub-lightspeed the pod could barely have gotten to and from the bar in time, and the trail wasn’t visible to any autonomous detection that Vilgo knew of.
Apparently, though, the human had maintained consciousness for more than sixty hours by gradually using more that 3g of caffeine, a poison so dangerous even humans weren’t usually supposed to ever consume more the 200mg at a time. But this human had traced their path with this venom coursing through her veins, only losing consciousness after leaving a signal beacon on their base asteroid and pointing her collapsing vessel towards the nearest world, and jamming the controls to full throttle. Even then, by the time she was within reach of the Federation authorities, she had enough composure to formally register charges against Vilgo and their crew.
Clearly, this was all an elaborate cover-up story for a traitor within Vilgo’s crew. But since they all were imprisoned together, they couldn’t think who might have sold them out.
what the fuck dude this is awesome i want this too now
Okay, but what about those deep sea fish that produce light at a wavelength that *only they can see.* Predators that can somehow sense you in a completely undectable and unfathomable manner to you; they might as well be psychic.
YES, EXACTLY–vision is SUCH an asspull?? Sometimes it’s “"dark”“ and we can’t see anything. And also we’re impaired for plot reasons! Sometimes ALIEN WEAPONRY or otherwise-innocuous ship components are ”“too bright”“ and we yell and try to hide, subject to some sort of obscure, tortuous imperative. The rest of the time we can UNERRINGLY tell when anyone is trying to play pranks on us, the names and emotional/physical status of EVERY SINGLE BEING IN THE ROOM (or, when outside civilized warrens, ”“line of sight”“)–and yes, of course, can’t forget about our nigh-mythical fighting arts revolving around insane dodging skills.
And SNIPING. And also, god, fuck–don’t forget about completely arbitrary “”””atmospheric disturbances””” (fog, smoke–the new “ionic interference”) ALSO plottasatically rendering our abilities moot.
Plus, some people have more powerful Vision than others, but some people have a very short effective range of Vision. However, humans have come up with devices that “change the angles of refraction” of the “light” so that the naturally impaired have their skills enhanced–but they can always be knocked off their faces or be broken.
Also some people are terrible at normal Vision work, but have excellent night vision and are skilled at working under adverse conditions.
Oooh, and human art is almost entirely Vision based. Think about non-seeing aliens trying to access the majority of human art!
IM!!! SCREAMING!!! GLASSES. Glasses are SUCH another great Weird Alien Gimmick. God–you get all used to your Human friend and their bizarre abilities, you just start to really trust in and rely on them in tight places and problem-solving a little bit, then you get fucken marooned on a fucken planetoid somewhere and they just in this very small little voice, after you have pulled them from the wreckage and sat down to go over your options, inform you that they’ve lost their glasses.
Oh my god and an episode where we’re up against Evil Humans and our heros turn to their humans like ‘you can see them, right, you can tell when they’re near? you can counter them?’ and our hero is genuinely shaken and worried— they’ve got high-tech military mechanical enhancers, the devices strapped to their heads let them see anywhere, they can operate in near-absolute ‘darkness’, they can operate in near-lethal ‘brightness’, they can see through walls— not doors, not glass, but walls.
Then we have a heroic scene where the crew’s human is the scrappy, desperate underdog for once instead of the cool and collected superbeing. It is super cool. The human and the captain probably mack wildly on one another in medbay after this. Roll credits.
Person 1: I dunno, dude. This ‘light’ stuff sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo to me. I mean, how do we know it’s even real?
Person 2: Seriously, how can something be a wave and a particle? That doesn’t even make sense.
Mysterious Human: Even if you cannot perceive the light, you can feel its warmth–
Person 1: Oh my god, please shut it with the mystical hoo-hah. You’re insufferable.
Mysterious, somewhat exasperated Human: the ‘light’ enters the sensitive paired apertures in our faces, passing through biological lenses and chambers to stimulate specific nerves we call ‘rods’ and ‘cones’. one set of nerves tells us the volume of light we’re perceiving, while the other estimates the wavelength frequency. the total input creates in our mind a continuous sonarscape of immense complexity, where we can perceive ‘textures’ that are impossible to understand with mere sound or touch. this is why my people’s communication devices are small, flat, silent boards: we ‘read’ the patterns of light they emit as language and ‘watch’ the patterns of light they emit as sonarscapes.
Captain: okay…. sounds fake, but okay…
And they just keep on making up new bullshit rules for how light works, like
Navigator: Warp drive engaged. We are approaching 90% of the Lorentz limit.
Human: What now?
Navigator: Oh, uh, it’s really complex, but lemme try. So, matter can only move so fast through space, right? Like absolutely, nothing can ever ever possibly go faster than like about 3 hundred million meters per second–
Human: Ah yes. The speed of light.
Navigator: …oh for fuck’s sake.
Captain: My god! Time! Has… frozen!
Human: Fuuuuuuuuck.
Captain: What?
Human: Remember how light is a wave and a particle?
Captain: Yes, we mention this every episode.
Human: Yeah, light’s frozen along with everything else. I can’t see shit.
Captain: My god! Our sonar doesn’t work either! The soundwaves— they can’t propagate through this frozen air! We’ll have to use just our whiskers!
Human: Fuuuuuuuuck.
The fanfiction for this show has to be amazing.
“Shh. Don’t try to hide your needs, Captain,” Hue Mann soothed. “My sight has told me all about your traumatic memories of the war.”
“What?” Captain gasped. “But…how…?”
“The light knows all,” explained Hue. “Time slows down at the speed of light. It sees all of the past..and all of the future.”
“And what is it telling you now?” questioned the Captain.
Hue leaned in close. “It tells me, ‘Mate with them now, you lovestruck fool!”
“Damn you, Hue Mann. Damn you and your penetrating ‘eyes.’”
“Oh,” breathed Hue, voice husky and sexual. “That’s not all my eyes can…penetrate.”
goddamn, you people amaze me.
I love the idea that the protag species has telepathy as ‘boring normal standard’ senses and they can’t understand why human thoughts seems so strange, fragmented, occasionally blank… until they realise that a great of human thought is ‘visual’ and so can’t be heard…
“Lori, what do your Human eyes see?”
“Coupla billboards, and it looks like it might rain.”
This keeps getting better
This is so cute. Your human crewmember is getting a crush on another human. Time to observe the humans’ weird yet endearing courtship rituals.
“Tell me all about them! What do you like about them?”
“Well, they have these amazing eyes…”
“Yeah? Better at the the wavemapping thing than yours?”
“…I don’t know how good their eyes are at seeing. They’re just this beautiful shade of brown.”
“Wait. You wavemap each other’s wavemapping organs? And have opinions about what nice frequencies they refract the waves at?”
“Yes? What’s so strange about this?”
“I thought your ‘vision’ was passive. Do you listen to each other’s ears too? And like the smell of each other’s noses?”
“Like you’ve never touched someone’s whiskers with your whiskers.”
“…That’s different.”
I just really like the idea of sighted humans telling their friends-who-don’t-see about how interesting-looking they are. Like, “You’re awfully pretty, you know that? You’re such a lovely shade of blue.”
And the friend’s like, “YEAH sure buddy” but they are secretly charmed, like someone discovering a new form of astrology that suits them really well – quietly thinking it over later when they’re alone, like I’m blue!! Yeah!! What’s blue?
@unmarkedcards isnt this the plot of a short story you read?
Imagine trying to explain colors when they do ask though
“What’s blue?”
“It comes in many forms? Light blue is like how rain feels when water is needed”
“What the HELL that’s beautiful! So what other forms does it come in?”
“There’s dark blue, that feels like sadness and remorse”
“Shit… How are they so different?”
“Light comes in many forms and colors and each human sees them a little differently”
“You sound insane… you know that right?”
“You look insane rubbing your whiskers on everything”
okay cool whats the opinion on girls who have high strength and power level big muscle but are also generally soft and squishy to the touch maybe a lil chubby round the tum area
Send me to Mars with party supplies before next august 5th
No guys you don’t understand.
The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.
So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.
This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.
That’s not sad, that’s awesome.
*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing
